Disclaimer: All concepts and characters belong to L.J. Smith and her publishers, with the exception of Teth, Mira, Genet, Grahme, Casey, Lauren, Cristona, Lara-Elena, Zorie, Stephen-Kyle, Abebi, and the house staff.

Rating: PG-13 (Mature content)

Spoilers: The Night World Before Strange Fate, all my previous fan fiction

A Matter of Capture

April 27, 1999

Teth D'Alessandro glanced at himself in the mirror, and then at the four bodyguards behind him. They each stood at least a foot taller than he did, were twice as wide as he was, and appeared to be identical quadruplets. Dressed in matching tuxes, Teth could have been their aging father.

He felt like an idiot, and it showed in his posture and expression. He barely knew Faren Grahme, it was absurd for him--a prisoner and mortal enemy--to be attending the man's wedding. It was even more absurd that Grahme himself had invited him.

But Grahme was not a normal man, and Teth was not a normal prisoner.

He had been at Thierry's mansion for just under five months. The injuries he had been dealt at the Winter Solstice party had healed completely, and since then he had occupied himself with exploring the vast libraries held within the house. Never was he without his body guards, four standing around him, another trailing just outside the doorway. A sixth sat in a fourth floor office and kept in contact with the other by walkie-talkie. Also, remote-control-activated collar with wooden lining had been fastened around Teth's throat. If he attempted to escape, Thierry could choke him to death at the push of a button.

The collar, Teth noted, was hidden under his shirt. It was a lovely outfit, expensive, tailored to his body. The body guards wore matching suits. Yes, his was a lavish prison, but it was a prison just the same.

Teth had accepted his situation fairly easily. He understood the rules of life and war, how these games played themselves out, the inevitable downside of dice. He had been willing to accept failure.

He had not been prepared for Thierry himself.

There were always alliances between Night People. Rarely, if ever, did they last beyond the first sacrifice. But Thierry was not looking to bargain with countries or assistance; he simply wanted loyalty. No payment, no bribes, he would build bridges made of respect until Teth could no longer bare to attempt destroying him.

There was a soft rap on the door. "Come in," Teth said, exercising his make-believe rights concerning privacy. He straightened his shoulders and was pleased to see the jacket fall more straightly over his arms.

Thierry looked exquisite in his gray coat-tails. His hair had been allowed to dry naturally and fell around the bend of his face, accenting his eyes. He smiled politely as he stepped inside and closed the door.

"We're going to begin in just a few minutes," he said. He spoke Teth's native language, a very old form of Italian. "I thought I'd escort you to the chapel."

"As a sort of trophy?" Teth asked. He knew that wasn't Thierry's intention, but he said it because he was doing his own building: wedges. He had learned his lesson once before; to love one's enemy was to forfeit.

"Of course not," Thierry said smoothly. "Grahme invited you, it was not my idea."

Teth shrugged. "Fine, let's go."

They walked leisurely down the marble hallways, side by side as if they were equals and not rivals. The wedding was going to be very small, just a few friends and those hanging around the house. No best man, no bride's maids. The house-keeper was going to play the piano. It wasn't a legal ceremony, either, just a promise-keeping rite between Grahme and Casey.

He had little interaction with most of the household, besides his bodyguards. Thierry visited him daily, and at first Teth had been suspicious that the visits were a ploy to gather information, but Thierry didn't care what they talked about. They once spent three hours discussing cloud formations, both of them with an honest ferver.

And Teth found himself falling into a trap that was far too personal and emotion-based for even Thierry to have devised. He was beginning to wonder if Thierry's views on humans were correct simply because the man was so intelligent. He had never known anyone with the scope of Thierry's understanding. He was...wise.

It comes with age, I suppose, Teth thought, as they stepped together through the hall. With age comes wisdom and understanding, and he's many times older than I am. I am inclined to believe him.

Or maybe it was Mira changing his mind.

Her lycanthropic sac, the gland responsible for producing the enzymes that allowed her to 'shift, had been crushed when he broke her neck. Her koala form was lost forever.

He had seen her once, just once, and of course it had been by accident. She avoided him at all costs, but late one morning he had dozed off in an upstairs reading room. When he woke up close to noon, annoyed by the bright sunlight and anxious to return to his sealed quarters in the basement, he walked out onto the staircase, bodyguards in tow, and saw her below. She was walking circle around the staircase, her feet shuffling over the tiled floors. Genet Travlier was with her. He had one arm wrapped protectively around her waist, ready to catch her if her knees should buckle. They were laughing, trying to teach each other French and Dutch while conversing in Czech. Mira's hair was longer than it had been when Teth had last seen her, still black at the roots while the silver ends brushed almost to her shoulders. Teth felt a wrench in his gut when an image of how it would feel to run his hand over her scalp came unbidden to his mind.

He had frozen and then waited until she was on the other side of the staircase to descend. He had brooded on the image for days.

"Come in here a moment," Thierry said, opening the door to a small room. This one was full of wax figures on display, gods and goddesses of every religion, so lifelike that if Teth let his eyes unfocus he could see them breathing.

Thierry closed the door, and they were alone. Thierry was the only one allowed to be in Teth's presence without the guards, but even with his incredible strength, he rarely took the chance.

The lights were low, arranged artfully to show the wax figures, and an air-conditioner had been turned to high so that the priceless pieces wouldn't melt. Theirry locked the door, then turned and reached out. Teth felt Thierry's cool, smooth hands close around his own and squeeze gently as he stepped forward.

"Grahme," he said, in a hushed, tender voice, "is my most dear friend in all the world. After Hannah, there is no one more important to me. You know that we have not been on the best of terms since my illness, but it gets easier with every passing day. However, he is suspicious of my interest in you. When you decide to give your loyalty to me, I will be happy to receive it, but please do not do so today. It will inevitably arouse Grahme's suspicion, and I'd rather his wedding day be without flaw."

"You speak as though my joining Circle Daybreak is inevitable."

"It is." Thierry shrugged, looking so young and so skillfully made up. "You are a fool if you think you haven't joined me already, just as you were a fool to think humanity not an asset."

Teth stepped back, pulling his hands away. He was stunned. "What does that mean?"

Thierry's soft smile played at the corners of his mouth. "Would I allow you to attend my dearest friend's wedding if I didn't trust you completely? Come on, we're going to be late."

He moved toward the door, but Teth remained frozen among the breathless figurines. There was something knowing in Thierry's voice, something hidden that Teth could not entirely grasp the meaning of nor dismiss.

"No, tell me," he said.

The guards came into view in the hallway, and Thierry said in a quick whisper, "We'll speak of it after the wedding."

There were no more than a dozen people in the chapel. It was a beautiful little room made up of skylights and windows, with just enough wall for mid-evil forestry murals. Behind the raised alter and below the great circular window made of emerald glass was a wall painted with a scene of two dainty unicorns drinking from a fountain. In the background, a lion stalked between the trees and long-vanished pudge birds hopped across the ground.

There were four rows of pews, set at an angle to the alter with its wrought iron railing. A table of Bright Blessing candles sat near it, only five unlit. Teth stepped forward and pressed a match to the stiff wick of the nearest votive, watching it jump to flame. "May your every night be warm," he murmured. It was an old vampire toast, maybe so old that Grahme wouldn't even recognize it.

Teth waited a moment while his body guards lit candles, then turned. His eyes focused, his body went hot and cold all over, his throat closed as if hot wax had been poured into his mouth.

Mira was sitting in the third row. She had changed again, her hair was now falling past her shoulder in impossibly thick strands and her make-up was an assortment of grays that had been blended beyond human notice. She was seated between Hannah Snow and Zorina Faer, Thierry's granddaughter, and they were all talking in low voices, laughing softly.

He stared at her a moment, watched how her gaze moved swiftly from Hannah to Zorie as the conversation changed hands, studied her intent concentration. She hadn't changed so much, not really. Her hair was still a thick pelt of animal fur that would destroy any brush made of less than steel, her hands were still slightly bent as if already halfway to shifting into three-finger koala hands, her eyes still appeared like maple syrup trapped under glass.

It was the little things that were different. She wore a gray sweater with a mock-turtle neck, but a scar still climbed like a vine under her chin. When she swallowed, she tensed. Her left hand clenched unconsciously around the back of the second row pew as if she was worried the floor might suddenly drop away.

Teth noticed a small diamond ring on that hand and nodded quietly to himself.

He sat down on the opposite side of the chapel, in the second row. A guard on either side, one behind, one in front. At the right end of the pew sat Lauren Cambridge, another of Thierry's granddaughters. There were three of them, none actual relations, but he doted on them just the same. Lauren was the language genius, the one who was almost fluent now in a third of the spoken languages on the planet. Zorie was the psychic historian who couldn't keep from picking up past events wherever she went. Cristona was the electronics prodigy who had built an entire colony of androids. One of them was sitting with her now, in the pew behind Hannah and Zorie.

Lauren smiled and extended her hand. "Hello, Teth. How have you been?"

She spoke Italian, of course. Not his ancient Italian, but a version less modern than today's. She'd been to see him a few times, for reasons he was still unsure of, but he'd been surprised by her maturity. Zorie was hysterically passionate, unable to shield herself from emotion, and Cristona was mostly disinterested in the outside world, but Lauren had sensibility. Lauren was the one who could conceivably rise to be Thierry's heir.

Should Thierry ever need an heir.

"Very well, thank you. Did you come especially for the wedding?"

She nodded, hands folded around a beaded purse. Never less than perfectly dressed. She had a brother who popped in and out of the mansion as well, Stephen-Kyle.

"After my parents died," Lauren said, "Stephen and I went to live with Grahme. He's been a father to us for years. It was lovely of you to come."

Teth felt uncomfortably defensive. "Our political differences don't interfere with my admiration for Grahme."

Lauren lifted her eyebrows but didn't respond.

Aside from Teth, Thierry, the granddaughters, Hannah, the bodyguards, and the bride and groom, the only creature present was Grahme's enormous tiger, Abebi. She was the largest of her breed Teth had ever seen, and her moody defense of Grahme and Casey made her a force to be reckoned with, even for a fourteen hundred year old vampire.

Grahme entered then, bringing with him Casey and the cat. He was dressed in a maroon satin suit with golden lining, and Casey wore a simple creme dress with gold and maroon piping along the v-neck. They were a simply stunning pair, if only because of their hair. Grahme's fell in perfect beige ringlets, Casey's in layered red waves, and they stood together like the mother and father of all beautiful people as they stepped up to the alter.

"Excuse me," Lauren whispered to Teth, and rose to mount the alter stairs.

He listened half-heartedly as she performed an unexpectedly traditional ceremony. His eyes wandered back to Mira. She still hadn't seen him, if her expression meant anything. He wished she would look his way, see him watching her and silently begging her forgiveness.

"In all freedom and personal choice you have come here to pledge support and love for each other."

No, not forgiveness. He didn't feel he needed that. He didn't even need her understanding, because she had agreed before he laid a finger on her that she posed a threat to him. He wanted....

"With this exchange of blood, you are forever bound to each other."

....to be near her again, even if it was just the way he had been before he hurt her. They had both been happy then. She had respected him, he had been content to watch and admire her. The look on her face at the opera had enough to keep him going for a year. He could just thrive on the fact that she was thriving.

"What Divinity has brought together, let no creature put asunder."

He hadn't spoken to her since she'd shot him. He'd said her name, and then she'd said, "Yeah, you bastard," and passed out. Since then he had respected Thierry's request that he not seek her out.

"I now pronounce you man and wife," Lauren said. The chapel erupted into applause.

They held a reception out in the garden. Squat candles burned among the potted plants, drawing the sweet flutter of moth wings, and the desert air was swift with spring. A long table was set with gifts and paper lanterns, Casey smiled and lay her head on Grahme's shoulder as she read the cards. The granddaughters, the android, and Hannah sat on rubbery lawn chairs sipping almost-virgin daiquiris and signing to each other between fits of giggles.

Teth knew that by this time Mira had noticed him, but he was surprised when she walked over. The dress was gray, a soft and comfortable cotton, and she wore sandals with it instead of the high heels she'd always donned when she stayed with him. The outfit was less elegant but somehow more fitting.

She had a champagne glass in one hand, filled only with water. The other hand was wrapped around a silver cane.

Teth was standing at the edge of the terrace, looking over the railing at the endless desert. From the other side of the house, Vegas could be seen sparkling in the distance, but from this side all that was visible was miles and miles of dark sand.

He turned slightly, his eyes drawn to the sparkling of the moonlight on the ends of her hair. He wanted to speak but forced himself to wait for her to make the first move, instead lowering his gaze to the ground.

"Bonjour," she said. Her voice was still breathy, but she went on quickly. "I don't want this to be any more awkward than it has to be, so I'll let you know that I don't even know what I'm doing here talking to you. If there weren't all these body guards around, I wouldn't even think of it."

"You don't have to be afraid of me," he told her.

"I'm not afraid of you. I just know better than to trust you."

She lifted the crystal flute and wetted her throat.

"I wouldn't hurt you."

"Not while it didn't serve an end," she agreed. "But if you had something to gain, or if I posed even the smallest threat, you might not hesitate."

"That's not true. If you were the last thing standing between me and Heaven I wouldn't touch you."

She lifted her eyes. "I can't tell if you're insulting me or not."

"I'm not. I'm saying that I know better than to try and hurt you."

"What hurts me hurts you."

"It almost killed me the last time."

"So Genet told me." She glanced past him, out into the clear night. The sleeves of her dress were long, but she still shivered. "He says he loves me, you know. That he wants to marry me." She laughed softly. "I didn't know what to tell him when he asked. I said I had to come back here and see you before I could decide. Now I'm here and I still don't know what to tell him."

Teth was at an equal loss. She went on.

"I wish your heart didn't show on your face. I didn't come here to hurt you this way, I just wanted to know if there was a chance we could fix things." She laughed again. "That's nuts. I'm human now, you're trying to wipe out my species."

"Not actively."

"Does that change anything? You haven't joined Thierry, you're still my enemy."

"Have you ever thought that my politics and my private life aren't the same?"

"I know they aren't. If they were, you wouldn't love Thierry the way you do."

Love Thierry? Teth shuddered inside. "I don't love Thierry."

"Yes you do. You're such a terrible liar, Teth, I don't understand how you rose to this kind of power when you couldn't bullshit a toddler."

"Is that what Thierry told you?"

"No, I've been hanging out with the surveillance guy. We sit around and watch you together for days at a time. When you and Thierry talk, or read together, or walk through the art gallery, we listen through that mike in your collar. I've been here all month. Don't cringe like that, Teth. If anything, I just see myself in you. I think I used to look at you the way you look at Thierry, and it's not undeserved by either of you."

Teth turned away. "Are you doing this to hurt me?"

"No." He heard her drink again, then thank a body guard as he brought her a chair to sit down in. "It's strange being human," she murmured, then fell silent.

Teth allowed the hush to stretch. Grahme and Casey were talking about Stephen at the other end of the terrace, about Thierry's brilliance in sending the boy to keep Iliana Harman company. Apparently the two here hitting it off beautifully.

He swallowed hard. Thierry knew he could hear ever word.

"Mira," he said, lifting his head and turning back to her.

Somehow she was a few feet closer than she had been when he looked away. Her feet were tucked up under her in the chair.

"You don't want to debate politics with me," he said.

"Why not? I know more about them than you do."

He lifted an eyebrow and she smiled, the first smile he'd seen her put on in six months. "Go on," she said.

He did, but his mind was still caught on the hint she had dropped him like a pant-leg on an exposed nail. Thierry had earlier said something similar, that Teth was a fool for dismissing humans. He wondered what it meant.

"The connection between us is irrevocable," he said, "but that doesn't mean you have to give up your life to it. If you love Genet and you'll be happy with him, don't let me stop you."

She shook her head. "It is irrevocable. But just because I ignore it doesn't mean it will go away."

"Four months is not a long time. In years, the memory will fade."

"Doesn't matter. Don't you see, Teth? It's the same between us as it is between you and Thierry."

He frowned, wishing he could stop her. His intuition said that this conversation could only lead toward the demolition of his moral standing. "I don't follow."

"You claim you don't love him. You refuse to offer up your blood as a sign of loyalty. You swear that if you had the opportunity, you would kill him. You say your feelings about humans haven't been swayed in the slightest by his influence. But you lie."

"I don't."

"You lie to yourself then, Teth. He tells you his secrets, I've heard him. You know where the Wild Powers are. You know about Cristona's army of androids. You play pool with his soulmate." She smiled again. "Don't tell me you aren't friends, or that you don't respect him. I know you do, and that if a showdown came tomorrow, you would support him."

She stood up awkwardly, leaning heavily on her cane. "You don't follow him because you agree with him, Teth, you do it because you trust him as a person."

The words struck him like tiny wooden blows. "What does this have to do with you and me?"

"Just because we say we can never be together doesn't mean it's true. Formal surrender doesn't define capture."

If you have me, you have me, he finished in his mind. And denying it doesn't make me any less your prisoner.

Mira sighed. "Casey and Grahme are leaving, and I want to say goodbye. I wouldn't have recovered if they hadn't been around to cheer me up. I'll....I'll see you later, Teth."

He nodded and watched her walk away. She used the cane more as a confidence booster than a crutch; he expected that she would be walking easily on her own within another few months.

The things she had said were still raw inside him. It was good to know that he hadn't crippled all of her.

"Do you want to know how this whole soulmate situation came about?" Thierry asked Teth, as he poured pajiq into two bulbous brandy glasses. "It's quite amusing, really."

They were alone together in a corner room of the mansion. The windows were open, and between them burned a passionate fire that seemed to giggle as it cracked. The shelves were lined with geodes, rocks broken open to reveal crystal formations. Old articles of clothing had been restored and fitted to the wicker manakin bodies that lazed between pieces of furniture, old coats and dresses that Thierry had picked up over the years. It was a room drawn to focus on the fireplace, and the view of the desert that stretched out on either side of it.

Grahme and Casey had departed just before dawn on a private flight to Greece. Hannah and the granddaughters had retired upstairs for a "good old-fashion middle-school slumber party," complete with Thierry's entire collect of Planet of the Apes movies. Mira had gone with them, and now Thierry and Teth were alone. Even the body guards had been sent away.

"Situation?" Teth asked, smiling bemusedly. He was resting on a thick, high-armed sofa-chair. "You make it sound like a fiasco."

"It is a fiasco," Thierry told him. "From beginning to end. Naturally, it began with Lilith." He paused and then handed Teth the glass of pajiq. "Do you know Lilith?"

"I know of her, everyone does. But we haven't met."

"Ah." Thierry nodded and sat down across from him. "Lilith and I first met three years before I was changed. Everyone will tell you something different when you ask what she was, a goddess, a fairy, the first woman ever created. I can't lend validity to any of them, because to me she has always just been a woman who walks into a room and then walks out, using the door like any normal person.

"We were in a market place together, and we got into a terrible argument over a roasted leg of lamp she was trying to see. She became so angry that she actually struck me, and while a number of on-lookers tried to drag her away, she swore that she would speak with Death and tell him not ever to take me, that I would be cursed with eternal life."

They both laughed softly, and Thierry went on, "Of course, at the time, I thought nothing of it. I assumed she was crazy. In fact, it wasn't until I'd been a vampire for at least two hundred years that it occurred to me she might have somehow manipulated my situation to fit her own desires."

Teth's anxiety had eased as the night passed. His denial of any loyalty was back solidly in place, even as he was sitting with Thierry in a cozy room sharing old stories.

"According to Hunter," Thierry continued, "and I don't know where he heard this story, a decade or two before I met Lilith, she had a similar argument with the king of Persia. Although it wasn't called Persia in those days. She has a terrible temper, that's one thing everyone agrees on, and she collects grudges like charms on a bracelet. The king said something to her, and she was furious with him, so came up with the idea of incapacitating him and crippling his kingdom by binding his heart to another's. She chose a holy woman named Ayanna, a sort of ancient nun who had taken vows of chastity, silence, poverty, and the rest, and she was very well-known by the Persian people. Considered a pillar of virtue for the community. The king fell madly in love with her, she fell madly in love with him, and they ended up running off together and seeking refuge in the nether-regions of Sumaria.

"Persia fell into chaos, but Lilith was still unsatisfied because the king and Ayanna were so happy together. It had never occurred to her that people might like being bound together, that they might find fulfillment in it. She had been sure they would hate having to rely on one another."

"Did she take revenge?" Teth asked, sipping his concoction of blood, brandy and saline.

"Eventually," Theirry replied, "but it was nothing as horrifying as she had hoped. She had them impaled in front of the palace, where people could throw things at them and the like. A wretched death, but nothing compared to the emotional horrors she had wanted to bestow on them.

"It's rumored that I was her second attempt at revenge through love."

Thierry grew quiet.

"I take it she did better the second time."

"Practice makes perfect," Thierry agreed. "I saw her a number of times over the years, she would come by my place of residence and taunt me. She kept Maya in gold for years. Then she made a fatal mistake."

"What was that?"

"She decided to see what all the fuss was about, and created a soulmate of her own. He made her miserable, his dying left her broken, and she came to my doorstep in the hottest hour of the day to beg my forgiveness."

"Which you naturally gave."

"Naturally. She was a pathetic spectacle, Teth, this goddess incarnate sitting on the davenport bawling until she could barely breathe. She announced to me that there would be no more soulmates, and I had to beg her to allow Hannah to be reborn. Finally she agreed, not only to that but to letting the other eight couples in the world who were in similar straights continue on their wretched missions. That was 1417, and I didn't see her again until 1866, when she came back to ask me if I was sure that I wanted to continue on this miserable merry-go-round with Hannah and Maya.

"Between 1417 and 1978 there were no soulmates born, aside from the afore mentioned nine couples. In the meantime, the Night World grew, and the humans made amazing leaps in tecnowledgy. You knew that, you're how old?"

"Fourteen hundred, or there abouts."

"I hadn't realized you were so old."

Teth shrugged gingerly. "The years seem to stretch after a while, don't they? Time becomes distorted."

"Very true. In 1978, Lilith became suddenly announced that she was going to begin again with the soulmates. Have you heard of the Headmaster's Realm?"

"I wasn't aware it truly existed," Teth said.

"It does. In fact, Ash Redfern's soulmate is working there at the moment. They're responsible for most of the day-to-day functions of life on this planet, dealing mostly with arranging Destinies. A young man I know who works there claims it's like playing a huge game of Risk.

"According to an intern in the office of Emotional Affairs, Lilith walked in one afternoon and announced that they had to start a bureau for soulmates. One pair out of every ten thousand was the reported number, and as she was leaving, she gave the instructions, Don't make it easy for them. So the board members went into a panic, trying to figure out what she meant, and finally decided that the best way to stir up trouble using soulmates as a tool was to match humans with Night People.

"Lilith didn't bother checking up on the project for fourteen years, by which time the whole mess was irrevocable. Couples were already sprouting and causing problems. Lilith was hysterical. She came to me, as if I knew what to do, and I convinced her that it would all work out for the best in the end, which I didn't believe for a moment that it would."

"Which is why after fourteen hundred years," Teth said, "I've suddenly found Mira."

"Exactly." Thierry reached for the bottle of pajiq and refilled Teth's glass. "You don't treat her with the same disdain you do the other humans," he noted casually.

"She's your guest. The position demands respect."

He smiled. "Mira rarely demands anything."

Teth remained serious. "Then consider it a sign of respect for you."

Thierry rose swiftly and went to place his brandy glass back on the rolling cart. "Have you heard of a drug called Josselphin?"

He didn't like Thierry's tone. "No."

"It's been around for almost twenty years now, used for a variety of things rather unsuccessfully. The most recent use is as an insulin substitute for diabetics." He sat down again, shifting to make himself more comfortable. "Ash Redfern was unaware of that when he took up with a young woman named Nina Rosette. Even if he had known of the medicine, he probably wouldn't have realized the danger of it."

He stopped. "You know Violet Yarrow, don't you?"

"We've met on occasion, but we've never been close."

"But you know about Schule Sav Set and the experiments on humans that go on there?"

"Yes."

"Did you know that she also uses Night People in her experiments?"

Teth sat up straight and his hand clenched around his glass. "That's illegal."

"And amoral. And probably just cruel. But what can I say? Violet believes more in the vital importance of science than she does in emotion. Her own son suffers from deformities because of the experiments she performed on him before his birth."

"You know about this, and you allow it to go on?" Teth asked, outraged. The idea that a Night Person was hurting others, when they had enough problems with Circle Daybreak was unthinkable.

Thierry nodded, remaining calm. "The money that funds the school comes from me. Violet doesn't know that. Two hundred years, and she still hasn't connected me to Janus Fl'Fovie."

The room darkened as he spoke, and Teth leaned forward. "I don't understand. Why would you provide funds so that Violet could perform torturous experiments on humans? You're humanity's champion."

"Yes." Thierry's face was still composed, but Teth could see a shade of sadness in his eyes. "I handed humans over to Violet on the slim chance that she would do something that would help me."

Suddenly Teth's stomach was turning over. "Did she?" he whispered. He didn't know what he was afraid of.

Thierry nodded. "Miss Rosette gave birth several days ago to a vampire-human mixed child. I went to see her in the hospital, the baby is doing very well, despite being born twelve weeks premature. She has a vampire's strength and beauty."

"The drug allowed her to conceive with a vampire?"

"It suppressed the human immune system in such a way that what would usually be considered incompatible DNA is no longer disregarded. Not to a radical degree, she could not have mated with a dog and given birth to puppy-children, but vampire and human DNA is still very similar."

Teth was swimming inside as Thierry went on.

"As soon as I heard from Violet that Miss Rosette had become pregnant, I pulled up the medical files on Jezebel Redfern's mother. She was an epileptic, and her doctor prescribed Josselphin to keep her body from going into shock after grand mal seizures. At the time, she had no idea why she was able to conceive, but now it's quite apparent. Josselphin works on human women, allowing them to conceive the children of witches, vampires, and shapeshifters. Where witches are involved, the conception rate has been only six percent lower than that between human couples, and only twelve percent lower than witch couples. Vampires are much rare, we found only a twenty-nine percent conception rate among vampire-human couples, and shapeshifters are in between."

"You've tested this," Teth gasped.

Thierry nodded yet again, confirming everything. "In 1834, one of Violet's experiments conceived of a human-werewolf child while taking an extract from a plant she called lycanaviv. It was actually a cross-breed between several generations of Afrian wild-bush and Spanish water-lilies, and I won't even get into how she came to breed those two. Sufficient to say, she didn't discover lycanaviv overnight."

"How did humans get it?"

"She thinks that she spilled some seeds out of her purse while at a garden party. The seeds sprouted in the backyard, were picked up by the wind, and eighty years later, a biologist decided to see what they were good for. Lycanaviv is found only in southern California, although it continues to spread and is now being grown for commercial use."

Teth collapsed back in his chair, blowing out a long breath. "I can't hardly believe this."

"I was shocked," Thierry conceded. "Lycanaviv has its limitations, it won't work for couples where the male is human. It's only effective on females. But is has several close cousins that Violet is continuing to work with. Also, it has a zero percent success rate where made vampires are concerned."

"You've known about this for over a hundred years?"

"Yes. More than that, I was curious. Carabelissima Rosette was born twelve weeks early, almost a certain death warrant for a human child, yet she is in perfect health. What vampire tenancies she'll have she's too young for us to discover yet, but Jezebel Redfern is capable of living as a vampire with full-power as long as she feeds, or living as a human at human strength without blood.

"Violet is ambitious, when it comes to her work. I know that in person she can seem very fragile, especially since her soulmate was killed two years ago, but her constitution when it comes to science is amazing. She delivered the werewolf-human baby and studied it, meanwhile breeding six more. With my funding, she set up a farm in the wastelands of New Mexico where no one would find her, and she began devoting all of her energies to understanding cross-breeding and lycanaviv. The children she raised were not children in any sense you or I would understand, they were souless, unresponsive little people without any volition of their own. Honestly, I can't stand to be in the same room with one of them.

"But as I said, Violet was dedicated. She twisted the children into intricate family trees, studying them and their offspring, breeding them as soon as they were old enough. There were control groups always, but there were also wild experiments that produced amazing results."

He fell silent, staring down at the empty brandy glass still cradled in his hands.

"Dear god," Teth said, "don't leave me there. What did she find?"

Thierry looked, and his eyes were brimming with tears. "I told you before, you were a fool to dismiss humanity so quickly. I understand why, I do. For so many years we were feared, pushed away as freaks and dangerous monsters. It's hard not to grow bitter when the blood you once could have taken while giving great pleasure now has to be snatched by force. They've perverted our magic with their horror stories and graphic, irreverent movies.

"We're as much to blame any more. Believing that we are superior simply because of our strength and speed has grown into a belief that our souls are somehow larger than theirs, more significant in the scheme of things." A fine tremor ran through him. "What bullshit," he whispered fervidly.

"Are you saying you love them because you pity them?" Teth asked.

"No, I'm saying I love them because I am one of them. So are you. Look back far enough and you'll find that we have the same mother, and you don't discount a brother simple because he cannot see as well in the dark as you can. Do not assume that power of the spirit is so tightly intertwined with power of the limbs."

He stood again, and refilled his glass. Teth watched as he tilted the glass back and drank the liquor in one long, smooth gulp.

Thierry exhaled deeply, and then said, "Seven generations down, the breed reached a critical stage. The first sign that we were really onto something was just called G-2, but I named her Perdita. It means, 'lost child,' and I thought that was fitting. She wasn't a vampire, she wasn't a human, she wasn't a 'shifter or a witch. And God knows, she wasn't human."

"What was she?"

"I don't know. I still don't. She was all of us, all of the Night World and the humans made flesh together. She walked in the daylight without cringing and she didn't drink blood, but she had the strength of a vampire and the longing to hunt. She spoke to me with her mind, recognized me as being something similar to herself. She was only two years old, and she had a vocabulary of over fifteen thousand words. When she was six, she explained to me the workings of the space-time continueum, something scientists were just beginning to consider.

"Violet kept breeding, frantically. Her farm grew, and without my knowledge, she began killing some of the outdated experiments and the useless girls. If I had known what was happening, I never would have allowed it, but she kept in the dark about certain things, such as the offsprings' growing power toward telekinesis. When I discovered the mass grave on the edge of the property, I beat Violet to within an inch of her life."

He paused again, as if disgusted with himself and the memory, then went on.

"The tenth generation was the first with multiple shapeshifting abilities. By this time I was insisting that the children be treated as people, and given names instead of numbers. The most powerful of the tenth generation was Luchian, descended from a bastard child of the First House of Shapeshifters. Not only was be able to pick his shape, he was able to pick several. He eventually accumulated four different animals, not to mention having the strength of a vampire, the sunlight-tolerance of a human, and the magical ability of a witch.

"Violet considered the fourteenth generation, strand nine, line three, to be perfection. Two hundred years of work culminated in six children, four boys and two girls, who represented the strengths of every Night Person and human, without any sort of weaknesses. Those six I took away from her, to be at the mansion with me. I wanted to see if they understand what their power meant, or if we had created little soulless creatures.

"Unfortunately, the latter proved to be true. They had to be destroyed, but I knew even as I killed them that they represented the pinnacle of humanoid life. No other mix was successful the way strand nine was, and Violet remains convinced that it's because of the human influence. The most similar was strand four, where human sires were replaced with witches, but even then, most of the children born had a terrible aversion to sunlight. The shapeshifters were entirely at the mercy of the full more, even those not wolves. Likewise, strand three, which omitted vampires from the mix, was lacking in mental speed, and also in strength. The group without witch input tended to be absolutely blood thirsty. The vampire-werewolf children born were almost all dangerous lunatics. The problems weren't merely physical but mental; brain chemistry was altered disastrously without input from all four groups to help even each other out.

"And even when the physiology was perfect, they were still just children. Amazing, brilliant children, but children just the same. Without love and guidance they grew up deranged and dangerous."

Thierry closed his eyes, and Teth asked, "What happened to the farm?"

"I shut it down. The experimental children were destroyed. You are the ninth person who knows about this."

"Who else?"

"Myself, Violet, Hannah, Quinn, Maze, Lilith, and two aids who worked at the farm."

Teth was shaking all over. His hands shook until he was forced to set his brandy glass on the coffee table for fear of breaking it.

"This changes everything."

"Yes."

"You speak of them as if they aren't inferior, but a link allowing us to grow stronger."

"They're more than that. They're a vital part of the equation that equals our next evolutionary step. The night Lilith came to me, after she had discovered that the Headmaster's people were creating human-Night World soulmate pairs, she accused me of being God. She said that I had manipulated her to my own ends, that I was going to force the inter-breeding."

Teth stared at the ancient boy before him. "Are you God?" he asked breathlessly.

Thierry shook his head. He stood up and moved to sit beside Teth. "I'm not God. I'm just trying to keep us all from making a terrible mistake. If we don't accept humans as equals--no, even more than that. If we don't accept them as vital to our own growth, we'll be giving up more power than we ever dreamed of."

Teth's heart was pounding. "So many people I've hurt that I didn't need to. You should have told us years ago."

"No one would have believed me. There would have been outrage and rebellion. Circle Daybreak had barely enough members to fill a bus."

"I believe you."

"You are loyal to me, you'll believe anything I tell you."

"No." Teth pinched his eyes shut, still trying to deny his admiration. But it burned hotly within him, wondrous admiration that Thierry had been so daring to try something so radical, had been so dedicated that he had made such huge sacrifices and crossed such wide moral channels. Now they could both see the greater good that had come of it, but before? Had the grass on the other side seemed more than dust?

He didn't realize Thierry was holding him until he smelled the sweet herbal detergent in his shirt. "You won't betray me. I know that."

Tears fell from his eyes and wet the silken shoulder. "Trust me," Theirry went on. "Put your faith in me the way you want to. Even if you don't agree with me yet, even if you don't know how you feel about any of it, about the humans and the cross-breeding, let me guide you."

He felt hands at his neck. At first he thought they were searching for a vein, but then he realized that Thierry's gentle fingers were closing around the collar. With one flick of his wrist, the wood and metal snapped, and the device fell to the floor, releasing Teth.

"I haven't even sworn my loyalty yet," Teth protested through his tears.

"Mira was right when she told you that formal surrender doesn't define capture. You can deceive everyone else, but your heart lies with me."

Teth gave in for the first time in his life. The submission rendered him speechless, the comfort of knowing that someone wiser than himself was in control was sublime. Thierry held him close, rocked a little as a mother might have, and whispered on and on, "We can do this together, Teth. We can build this new world together."

Mira came in while Hannah was sleeping and Thierry was watching her. Later on he would climb up to his attic studio and paint her as she appeared now; he could not stand not to immortalize her like this.

Mira pushed the bed curtains to the side and whispered, "Thierry?"

He reached out for her hand, and drew her into the darkness with him. "I won’t step on Hannah?"

"She’s on my left."

Mira climbed into his lap, the way she had the first time she met him, and then she put her arms around his neck and kissed his cheeks.

"You’re leaving?"

"Yeah."

"Where?"

"Vienna today, Prague tomorrow. I don’t know, I’ll call when we get there."

"If Teth doesn’t first."

"Yeah. Except the impossible, okay? He’s got big things planned, and he has so much influence over Europe. I don’t know what’s going to happen."

"Only good things, I expect."

"Probably. I have to get going, Thierry."

"Okay. Be careful, Mira, and if you ever want to come home..."

"I know. Thanks for everything."

"Have a good time. I’ll talk to you in a few days."

She hugged him and then crawled out of the bed. Thierry closed his eyes, leaning against the headboard, and heard her pause in front of the door.

"Thierry?"

"Yes?"

She laughed. "He has really nice hands, doesn’t he?"

Thierry smiled through the darkness. "Yes, he does."

Jory San-Corinth